ConVirt Open Source is the leading open source product for managing Xen and KVM, enabling you to standardize and proactively manage your virtualized environment in a centralized fashion. With ConVirt, you can create and provision "gold" images, diagnose performance problems, and balance load across the data center, all from a highly interactive Web based interface and with consistent feature set across open source virtualization platforms. As an open source product, ConVirt Open Source is free to download and use. With a large user community and the commercial backing of Convirture, companies large and small use ConVirt as the strategic solution to their virtualization management needs.

Below is a summary of the key features of ConVirt Open Source:

3-tier, standards-based architecture

ConVirt Open Source is built on a brand new, 3-tier, repository based architecture, delivering the scalability, security, and integration ability necessary to satisfy even the most demanding organizations.

Highly interactive Web interface
ConVirt Open Source delivers an Ajax-based, highly interactive rich interface application, which you can access from anywhere via a Web browser. The user interface has been dramatically improved, with interactive dashboards bringing the most pressing issues to your attention right away, while providing the necessary details to diagnose and fix problems.

Data Repository
ConVirt Open Source includes a data repository, which serves as a central data store for all of the virtual machine and server configuration, task history, and availability and performance information. The amount of data ConVirt Open Source retains is fully customizable to your business needs, and you can view the historical information inside of the ConVirt Open Source dashboard or integrate it with your existing reporting tools.

Scalable and reliable agent-less architecture
Unlike other solutions, ConVirt Open Source does not require that you deploy an agent on the servers being managed. By eliminating the need to deploy software on the managed servers, ConVirt Open Source requires minimal effort to setup and install and can be rolled out very quickly.

Multi-user administration
ConVirt Open Source enables you to share responsibility for managing the virtualized environment between multiple administrators while maintaining full accountability. Each administrator has his or her own login and all of the actions they perform are being continuously audited.

Server Pool-based Management

In order to take advantage of the agility introduced by virtualization, you need to uniformly manage pools of servers according to IT policies and resource constraints. ConVirt Open Source simplifies server pool management by letting you monitor, provision, and configure virtual machines at the server pool level. For example, ConVirt Open Source summarizes key monitoring information across a server pool, allows you to apply pool-wide configuration and provisioning policies, and lets you associate shared storage with a pool of servers.

Templates-based provisioning

ConVirt Open Source takes a templates-based approach to server provisioning, letting you standardize your virtualized environments. You can easily customize the out-of-box templates or create new ones based on your own reference images or those of 3rd party virtual appliances. In just a few minutes, you can associate shared storage, define network parameters, and allocate CPU and memory to a template. Once you have a template defined, you can provision it onto a new or existing server with a single click.

Integrated virtual appliance browser
ConVirt Open Source has an integrated appliance catalog browser that detects ready-to-deploy virtual appliances from a growing number of leading 3rd party appliance vendors. You can browse the catalog of appliances — fully configured application images — and download virtual appliances right from the ConVirt Open Source dashboard. You can also publish any internal appliances and make them immediately available for provisioning with ConVirt Open Source.

Thin provisioning
ConVirt Open Source allocates storage as needed by the virtual machines instead of provisioning all of it upfront, enabling you use your storage resources much more efficiently.

Monitoring and configuration management

24x7 availability and performance monitoringAs soon as a virtual machine is deployed or a physical server is added, ConVirt Open Source automatically collects a comprehensive set of availability, performance and utilization metrics for CPU, memory, storage, and network I/O. All of the monitoring information is presented at multiple levels — individual virtual machine, physical server, server pool, and enterprise, bringing the most pressing issues to your attention right away.

Detailed configuration information
ConVirt Open Source automatically collects detailed configuration information for the physical servers and virtual machines. All of the information is also aggregated at a server pool and datacenter levels, providing you with a consolidated view of your entire environment and helping you ensure compliance with corporate policies.

Template compliance tracking
Provisioning templates are a great way to deploy standardized configurations across your environment. However, it is also important to ensure that virtual machines comply with corporate standards post provisioning. ConVirt Open Source tracks the relationships between virtual machines and the templates that were used to deploy them, and flags any discrepancies.

Administration

ConVirt Open Source lets you fully administer all the virtual machines in your open source virtualization deployment from a single console. For example, you can create, start, stop, snapshot, and de-commission virtual machines right from the ConVirt Open Source dashboard. You can also perform actions inside the virtual machine by launching the virtual machine console from within ConVirt Open Source.

Maintenance mode
ConVirt Open Source simplifies the time-consuming task of taking a server down for maintenance by enabling you to migrate all of the virtual machines on that server to a different server with spare capacity and optionally migrate them back when the original server is back online.

Changing resource allocation on a running VM
With ConVirt Open Source, you can change resource allocation on a running virtual machine without taking down the application or impacting your users.

Automation

ConVirt Open Source automates virtual machine migration and placement, simplifying the time consuming and overwhelming task of balancing load across your virtualized environment.

Drag-and-drop live migration
ConVirt Open Source lets you move live virtual machines between hosts with a simple drag-and-drop operation — while they are running, without interrupting their operations. This allows you to re-allocate physical resources to virtual machines and balance the workload without incurring any downtime. Whether you migrate a single virtual machine or a whole set of virtual machines, and whether you migrate them live or cold, you migrate them with a single drag-and-drop operation!

Intelligent virtual machine placement
When provisioning a new virtual machine or migrating an existing virtual machine, it is important to understand which server is the best candidate to host the additional workload. However, as the number of servers grows, determining resource utilization across servers gets increasingly difficult. ConVirt Open Source eliminates this time-consuming and error-prone task by automatically identifying the best placement of the virtual machine within the server pool, based on performance and resource utilization.

Storage monitoring and configuration

ConVirt Open Source lets you associate shared NAS/SAN storage topologies with server pools. Once storage is configured at the server pool level, all new virtual machines will inherit the same storage settings. At the same time, ConVirt Open Source automatically tracks storage usage across server pools, letting you monitor resource consumption in real-time and more easily plan for capacity.

Datacenter-wide view of storage
ConVirt Open Source enables you to define and monitor storage resources at the datacenter level, providing you with a centralized view of the storage allocation across your environment.

Network configuration

In cases where application isolation is required, ConVirt Open Source allows you to define host private networks and automates all of the steps needed to provision the networks, including DHCP configuration.

Datacenter-wide view of network
ConVirt Open Source provides the ability to define and view host private networks at the data center level, providing an at-a-glance view of the network setup in your environment.

ConVirt Open Source is licensed under GPL and is free to download and use. And if you need support, it is waiting for you. Convirture provides a range of support options for ConVirt Open Source users.